"Truth and Lies About Fascism" (1945)
By Carlo Alberto Biggini
Edited by the Press Office of the Republican Fascist Federation of Padua
From "Corriere della Sera," Tuesday 16th, Friday 19th January 1945-XXIII, No. 14 & 17
Padua,
31 January
1945-XXIII
After more than five years since the beginning of the Second World War, the need to re-present the problem of this war and its more remote aims has become even more pressing. The current conflict differs from any other in history not only for its extension over the whole globe, but also - and above all - for two new political and ideological factors that mark its fundamental characteristic: the relationship between the West and East, and the relationship between Democracy, Bolshevism and Fascism.
When the conflict broke out in the summer of 1939, one could be under the illusion that it would remain within the limits of a European war, a contest for supremacy between England and Germany, and one could look at it from this narrow point of view, siding with one side or the other. Although it is true that since then the ideological presuppositions of the contenders have given a particular physiognomy to the war, making the contrast between the political regimes the determining motive of it, at that time one could still, however, continue to think that behind the apparent ideological guise the problem remained essentially that of 1914. Not anymore: now this problem, even if it continues to exist in those terms, is by no means transversed by the greatest problems among which it has found itself inserted and therefore urges a new and deeper examination. We must, in short, free ourselves from the many notions and ideas with which we entered this Second World War, also because the starting points of it still rest in part on the previous historical epoch, such as the policy of European balance of power, nationalism, internationalism - in other words, on the systems and political concepts derived directly from the French Revolution.
At the same time that this struggle of peoples is taking place, a social struggle is also being fought within each people; the old ruling classes, clinging to a declining era, want to maintain their privileges and power. This explains, in part, the numerous betrayals that took place during the course of this war.
The Anglo-Americans certainly did not wage war out of some desire to help or "liberate" any Western European people, but rather because they saw themselves threatened by the advent of a new era, which was expressed in Italy and in Germany with more strength and awareness than anywhere else. Therefore, in judging the present war, we must not adhere to the deceptive appearance of things, but to the intimate content of the ongoing revolution.
From the time of the Holy Alliance - which arose specifically to combat the ideas of 1789, which, despite everything, continued to act as powerful spiritual forces which changed the face of Europe - until the fall of the Hapsburg Empire, throughout that entire period, no idea substantially contrasted with that of the French Revolution, but rather a conception and a form of life - liberal life - and a tradition still tenaciously enraged, which little by little were exhausted.
During the course of the First World War, people certainly were not fighting for the triumph of an idea: if a new idea was born, it was born only as a result of that war, after that war.
Wishing to be more adherent to the meaning of the current conflict, it is certain that 1941 marked a decisive turning point in the history of this conflict and it is still difficult to become conscious of the radical transformation of all the premises and of all the purposes. But, as the consciousness of the transformation is affirmed, we become conscious of the danger marked by the force of inertia, which leads us to continue on the path we have taken, without having sufficient mental flexibility to adapt to the new situation and to understand its new meaning. And the contrast between the old and the new, between the original aims and the current ones, between the partial conflicts and their system, has now assumed such proportions that the conflict can appear as a gigantic event that carries people away from any prediction and any actual awareness.
Now, it is upon this profound change in the meaning of the world conflict that Italian men of culture must feel the need to concentrate all their attention, with the ruthlessness and serenity necessary to better understand and better fight. And it is also clear how they - due to the much broader point of view from which they want to put themselves - cannot but wish a similar attitude on the part of men of culture all over the world, with the hope of equal open-mindedness and serenity.
Of the two new factors that have been indicated as characteristic of the conflict - namely the relationship between the West and the East, and that between Democracy, Bolshevism and Fascism - the first revision which many need to make in order to facilitate a better understanding of the journey concerns precisely "Fascism", that is to say, the political ideology in whose name the world has taken up arms.
Fascism today, after twenty-five years of existence since its foundation in Piazza San Sepolcro, is still fighting against Bolshevism, but it is also directly at war against democracy. Or as we would say, between East and West. And it is precisely this de facto situation in the conflict that clarifies the intimate nature of Fascism and the political and social revolution that it represents.
Fascism has always had this two-front character and its whole history can only be truly understood when the twofold need for information and consequent need for synthesis is deepened.
In its internal history, Fascism, born from the struggle against disorder, was supported by the bourgeoisie and appeared to be a bourgeois reactionary movement. And it was judged by many from this point of view, even after September 8, 1943. But the movement soon assumed a different physiognomy and, if one wanted to continue to speak of reaction, it was also necessary to recognize the emergence of a method of government whose fundamental characteristic is so-called totalitarianism. In other words, a process of statization began, which gradually invested all political and social life, preparing for the inevitable process of unification of social classes. Little by little, if one continued to stand in opposition to Fascism and to Corporativism, the opposition itself was split into two significant extremes.
On the one hand, indeed, the accusation of bourgeoisism and capitalism continued, and the end of class struggle saw the suffocation of the proletariat; on the other hand, the old bourgeois liberalism exploded, denouncing the statism of Fascism and recognizing in it a substantial affinity with Bolshevism. Significant extremes that now induce us, each time we are faced with an anti-fascist, to ask for further clarification: liberal or communist? Do you anti-fascists want a political regime in which the state machinery - which regulates all economic life - is dismantled, taking it away from free competition, which has governed all political life, hierarchizing it? Do you want to put an end to the hierarchical principle and the oneness of political command so as to bring the political struggle back to the level of democratic egalitarianism? Or do you want, instead, the end of every bourgeois residue, an iron statism capable of crushing any further velleity of the private person, the absolute subordination of the individual to the political organism, dictatorship to the bitter end and the continuous threat of capital execution? Liberals or Communists? But, when faced with this question, the anti-fascists respond by placing themselves on the right and on the left, demonstrating for this very reason, with obvious evidence, that the political problem of today is precisely that of the relationship between liberalism and communism, in other words that problem of which Fascism represents the first brilliant attempt at a solution.
Fascism has had an equal fate in its external history. On the one hand the democracies, scandalized by authoritarianism, the end of liberty, statism, autarchy; on the other Bolshevism, which viewed Fascism as a bourgeois and capitalist regime, indeed as the most bourgeois and the most capitalistic of all regimes. And, just as internally liberals and communists have only anti-fascism in common, so externally democracy and Bolshevism have found themselves united together only by anti-fascism. But if Fascism were overthrown at the national and international levels, what would tomorrow be? The answer to this question is now becoming evident, because with the end of Fascism the only thing that could happen is a renewed clash between liberalism and communism, and therefore a new fatal Fascism.
This is the reason why the time is ripe for men - even adversaries - to review the problem of Fascism.
The necessity for its advent is already felt at a global level and the process of the war is accelerating the movement of ideological and political conversion. The very alliance between the democracies and Bolshevism leads inevitably to the approximation of the two extremes into some form of Fascism. Authoritarianism and dictatorship are already increasingly asserting themselves in England and America, the state machinery is progressively suffocating private initiative, the social problem is imposing itself and the various Beveridge type plans echo the reasons for Fascist legislation. And together with this transformation is the need to attribute to Russia an evolution in the opposite direction, towards greater liberty and towards a return to individual needs hitherto suppressed or suffocated. Still against Fascism, therefore, but increasingly taking on the problem and approaching its solutions. Still against Fascism, but, despite everything, for Fascism. Fascism has already won the war, because it has won on a revolutionary level.
The fact is that Fascism, before any other political ideology, understood that the truly revolutionary problem was that of the synthesis of liberalism and socialism, and that any other political attempt to establish itself while neglecting one of the two essential needs of present life is by now vain politics: the recognition of the personality of the individual and an effective solution to the social problem. Democracies and Bolshevism have so far understood only one of these two needs and have therefore not really understood anything.
But, if the guiding principle of Fascism has already become a more or less conscious requirement of every other political regime, so as to allow the prediction of its generalization, a fundamental objection is often felt to move against it, and it is that which concerns the way with which the principle has been translated into reality. Thus the need expressed by Fascism is no longer denied, but they continue to deny that Fascism has succeeded in fulfilling the proposed task and insists on the necessity of pursuing the same aim in another way, and in a very different effective manner. Thus in Fascism they see not a synthesis but a misunderstanding of liberalism and socialism, a hybrid combination, that is, in which the needs of both are mortified, without any positive result. And thus, even if on the same plane as Fascism, they have begun to suggest here and there a recipe for a truer and more comprehensive synthesis, in which the best of the two opposing regimes is saved and its defects and limitations are denied. No longer Fascism, therefore, nor Corporatism, but any other name they can come up with to designate that political and social principle that Fascism supposedly would not have been able to implement.
Now, no sincere Fascist would deny that there is some truth to this objection, at least up until September 8th, and indeed the objection itself was first raised - and continues to be raised - precisely among the most conscious Fascists, even before anyone else. It constitutes, in fact, to the extent that it is justified, the internal propulsive force of the revolutionary movement, the stimulus for the continuous revision of itself, a dissatisfaction which is conducive also to radical improvements. Fascism, although it can boast a long and creative history, is still but at the beginning of its journey and it will have to accomplish many other steps before its ideal can be said to be purified from the waste that compromised it in the past and that would willingly try to compromise it again. Fascism therefore claims for itself the right and the duty to take this objection and to rest upon it the hopes and the will of the future. Fascism knows its insufficiencies, the dangers that loom over it, the distance that still separates it from its proposed aim; it knows the forces that have often rendered its tasks difficult and ambiguous; it has known, above all, active and passive resistance, both internal and external, which has altered and exhausted it. All of this Fascism knows and confesses, but precisely because of this, it denies with all its strength that the objection can be pronounced by others who are not Fascists. Because Fascism is not an abstract ideology that can be judged on the level of abstractions, it is not a utopia that can aspire to the perfection of a formal logic; it is a political movement that is inserted and operates within a specific historical reality and cannot be separated from it. Thus the only ones authorized to object would be the participants of another political movement that is able to translate into reality the same ideal principle while avoiding the errors of Fascism. It is too easy to establish in a map or in the formulation of some points a political ideal projected into the future, by which they intend the post-war period as the concrete beginning.
It is too easy to compare a purely theoretical perfection to a difficult practice. Fascism responds to such a claim by denouncing the current martinets as the true culprits of the negative aspects of Fascism. And not only that, we understand well that the internal martinets, taking refuge in the past, believed they could estrange themselves from Fascism, purging it of its own experience and contributing directly or indirectly to its deviations; but also, and above all, the external martinets who with their twenty-five year misunderstanding up until July 25th forced Fascism to stiffen and react, the consequences of which everyone is now paying and especially the entire Nation. It was the reactionary forces within and without which, in its harshness of polemic, in its dull obstructionism, in its more or less conscious alteration of deeds, have day in and day out made an attempt on the life of Fascism and have tried to wear it down intellectually and morally. But now they vainly claim the right to set up another hypothetical regime in opposition to Fascism, which has the same raison d'être as Fascism, although according to them it does not have Fascism's imperfections. They cannot oppose reality with reality and therefore cannot guarantee the goodness of a future which they have shown themselves radically incapable of in the past.
When our martinets attempt to put their words into practice, they too will realize that the purity of their ideals will have to become muddled in the same way and for the same reasons that characterized the path of Fascism. Thus to the prediction of an extension of Fascism in the post-war period we can add the equally easy prediction of a Fascism with all the defects of ours and perhaps even worse than ours. And worse, we say, precisely because it came too late, that is, when the reactionary forces will be more powerful and more deeply rooted than they are now, when obstacles and deviations will be more serious. Worse, especially, because the phenomenon of capitalism is much worse than us and because the clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will be more serious after another period of political maturation of the masses.
The greater negativity of foreign Fascism compared to Italian Fascism will naturally concern the fundamental principle of all political life: the principle of liberty. Now, it is precisely in relation to the idea of liberty that Fascism is most frequently opposed and it is precisely by looking to it that they hope for a political regime that goes beyond Fascism.
Except that, even in this regard, Fascism cannot accept the lesson that some claim to impart to it by contrasting it with the defense of certain fundamental liberties or certain rights of liberty. It can not accept it because it comes from those who have shown that they do not understand the greatest right of liberty: the right to work. And this simple right is to put in essentially new terms the problem of liberty, which non-Fascists delude themselves into thinking they can retain in traditional terms, albeit with some additions and some concessions to the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie must by now understand the meaning of the social and political revolution which is now in progress and must recognize that unifying the classes means unifying the liberties of the classes. But, as long as it insists on ignoring the liberty to which the proletariat tends, it will not be able to understand the difference between liberty and privilege, between rights and arbitrariness. Two classes means two degrees of liberty, and that is precisely privilege and slavery: wanting to defend liberty today by maintaining the distinction between social classes means only rhetoric and bad faith.
But how are classes and their rights to liberty unified? Obviously, if we are talking about two grades that are quantitatively and qualitatively different, we need a renunciation and a more or less large transformation of one class in favor of the other. That is to say, the bourgeois class must lose much of its liberty which in reality constitutes its privilege and must anticipate a lifestyle change in relation to mass needs. If it is able to convince itself of this necessity, it will collaborate towards unification with the least possible sacrifice; if, on the other hand, it refuses, it cannot but whine helplessly about violated liberties and will make the transition period much more serious and destructive.
Now, all the protests taking place at home and abroad against the "violations" of liberty characteristic of Fascism are fundamentally due to a misunderstanding of its meaning, and, the greater the misunderstanding, the stronger the revolutionary need to react and to accentuate the contrast becomes. As a result, Fascism's effort to unify the classes is forced to take place increasingly in the sense of sacrificing traditional values to the needs of new exigencies.
It is this historical necessity that liberalism must convince itself of in the face of Fascism. Meeting the liberty of the masses does not mean, as the old liberal believes or pretends to believe, granting the masses the rights of liberty of the bourgeoisie, but granting - at the outset and as a prerequisite of all other freedoms - the right to work and equal starting positions in the struggle of life. This presupposition implies another set of presuppositions called programmatic economics, economic independence of the nation, constraint of private initiative, transformation of the right to property and, in the international sphere, redistribution of the world's wealth. If, being confronted with these needs, the national and international bourgeoisie shows proof of intelligence and collaboration, the revolutionary process can be carried out with relative tranquility; if, on the contrary, the bourgeoisie reacts by anchoring itself in its privileged position, then the impact, the violence and the authoritarian mediation of the arbitrator becomes fatal. Thus Fascist authoritarianism was born, and, if our adversaries wanted to point to the true culprit, they could only identify it in the anachronistic mentality of the liberals.
But authoritarianism also has another transiently irreplaceable technical function. To understand it, it is sufficient to look at wartime exigencies, i.e. the so-called war harness. In war everyone feels the need for full powers, the strong hand that unifies the efforts to reach the common goal; in war nobody feels the need to protest against the limitations imposed by the State.
Well, a revolution has the same exigencies as a war and cannot be carried out seriously without an exceptional form of discipline. A new political regime cannot suddenly arise, immediately settling down in the form of an ordinary administration. It needs a unifying center that characterizes the period of transition, during which science and life will be building the new political institutes to foster an organic unification of the classes, which cannot materially and spiritually be established without an adequate process of maturation.
Hence why authoritarianism has characterized—albeit in different forms due to the diversity of individual historical conditions - all the new revolutionary regimes, from Bolshevism to Fascism, to Nazism, to Falangism, to large and small countries, from Turkey to Romania and Portugal. But above all, this is because authoritarianism is at the gates—and indeed has already broken through the gates - of the great democracies, which until recently mocked the political forms of Fascism. The social problem can no longer be neglected or left in the background and the same historical necessities must impose themselves in all countries.
Fascism is able to give the social and legal order a concrete content and is able to realize the condition because the idea of equality acquires its true meaning.
After all, the essential and new aspect of Fascism consists in having proclaimed, in having made laughable to everyone, in having made official, so to speak, the emptiness of modern society. With clear powerful intuition, Fascism grasped this void as the epilogue of the whole modern world and has made this immense emptiness the premise of its action.
Indeed, Mussolini, grasping it with a unique understanding of its depth, realized that the crisis of the modern world was translated into a social void, into a society in which the social bond had ceased, if the social bond is the recognition of the individual, in the active and concrete sense of life lived in common in the common enjoyment of the good things of life.
Does the State exist when the people are outside of it, when entire masses are socially and legally beyond its scope? This question, posed by Fascism during all its experience, marked a real return to the origins of the State, a re-proposal of the problem of politics in its constitutive terms: the foundation of the social city, the foundation of the State.
A revolution cannot be conceived without a revelation. And what else can the revelation be if not the knowledge of a state of mind, the interpretation of a lifestyle that urges and beats on the doors of those new times that are persistently sought, the awareness of new necessities, of new needs?
What meaning would the word 'political genius' have if it excluded an inventive, moral and political power? A 'genius' is one to whom the truth is revealed, one who finds the hidden truth or who creates the truth. He sees first what others do not see, and finds what others do not seek.
But how could our enemies have forgotten the words of the 1930 message in which Mussolini, like every true discoverer, certain of the unacknowledged truth, proclaimed that the Fascist conception, responding to universal needs, solves the triune problem of relations between the State and the individual, between the State and groups, and between groups and organized groups?
Now the problem can only have one true solution. And since the existence of this triune problem cannot be denied, once the true solution is found, it destroys all the pseudo-solutions.
In short, just as there is only one answer to an arithmetic problem, so in the great and decisive moments of history, in the movements that mark the epochs of the journey of peoples, the answer to a political problem is only one.
These are the reasons why we feel the need to address Italian and foreign men of culture and invite them to review their judgment of the reality of Fascism.
After twenty-five years of Fascism, the Italians feel they have a conception that is essentially freer than that of their judges and feel that they have concretely addressed problems that others today can barely grasp. Therefore they know that the destruction of Fascism is a utopia, the vain pursuit of which will only broaden the path of useless ruins. Even if the enemy succeeds in imposing a different political regime over all of Italy, this in itself would not kill Fascism, because the problems which led to Fascism would rise again more drastically, in a much more ferocious clash between liberalism and communism. The only result they would obtain would be the renunciation of an experience of twenty-five years and all the problems that have arisen laboriously during that period.
Italian culture is freer because it is enriched by this irreplaceable experience and is able to understand the opposing needs of others. It must continue to work to give profound doctrinal developments to Fascism, which, after September 8, 1943, had a great new revolutionary impulse. Meanwhile today, as the conflict is about to reach its decisive stages, Italy feels itself to be the most serene nation for being able to speak a word that is not merely partial. And other peoples can listen without prejudice to this non-deceptive voice. It cannot deceive, because, if Italy hates the enemy, everyone knows that hatred is only for evil and that it aspires to turn it into a feeling of living solidarity; it cannot deceive because, if it speaks of imperialism, it has given proof that it intends imperialism only as a fruitful and beneficent reason for work. Finally, it cannot deceive, because all of Italy's history demonstrates that a single aspiration has always been at the root of our conscience, namely a vision of life that has a universal character. Fascism today also wants to have this universal character, and if it fights in the East and in the West, it is only in view of a tomorrow in which a superior collaboration can be realized between these two worlds which are still very spiritually estranged from each other.
But, precisely because it is just as much Italian as it is universal, it is the faith for which Italy fights, and no one deludes himself into thinking that it can be easily defeated. If those watching superficially from the outside notice the intimate dissatisfaction of a revolutionary process that tends towards the better, they are certain that, under this critical feature characteristic of Italian intelligence, today as never before there is a profound awareness of defending a superior ideal reality.
